


primum nil nocere

by alleyesonthehindenburg



Series: Orange Coloured Sky [1]
Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sentinels & Guides, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-27 23:11:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16711828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alleyesonthehindenburg/pseuds/alleyesonthehindenburg
Summary: BJ Hunnicutt is a sentinel, and Hawkeye Pierce is a guide. Korea isn't the start of their story – just the next chapter.





	1. BJ

BJ’s nineteen when he tunes in.

It’s the worst day of his life so far by a long shot. His head is pounding when he wakes up, the bedsheets scratchy and rough on his skin, but he drags himself out of bed to get to class anyway. Breakfast is a few bites of cornflakes that set his stomach roiling. The birdsong that he usual enjoys during his morning walks across campus grates at his ears, and it’s only ten minutes into class that he throws up and passes out. He wakes up at the university health centre, and a few hours later, it’s confirmed: he’s a sentinel, fully active, all five senses tuned in. It’s good to know, but doesn’t stop him from feeling like hell. Josephine does. She’s the provisional guide on call, and she may be a few decades older than BJ’s usual taste, but he loves her a little bit for making the pain stop.

It takes a while, but he gets the hang of it, learns how not to zone out at every provocation, and throws himself back into his studies with aplomb. Before he knows it he’s being scouted by Stanford for their medical programme. Sharper vision, better hearing, a keener sense of smell – they’re all good qualities in a surgeon, and it’s what he wanted to do anyway, so he doesn’t mind. There’s a little part of him that wonders if he could have done it on his own, but he pushes the thought away. He’s got this gift, for whatever reason, and he’d rather it be used in an operating room than on the battlefields of Tunisia.

In ’44, he finishes undergrad, and he’s in his first year of med school when the Allies take Germany. His mother cries when she hears the news, because he may have a lot of work left before he earns his license, but everyone knows where sentinels go when there’s a war on – even the doctors.

He meets Peggy Jane Hayden in the summer of 1947. If BJ’s life were a movie, she’d be his perfect guide, blushing and demure. She’d smell like roses and sunshine and petrichor, and it’d be love at first sight. Instead she’s not a guide, she smells like sweat and cigarette smoke, and she snaps at him for not looking where he’s going. BJ proposes six months later.

Between medical school and residency, he meets more guides in seven years than he’s met in his whole life. It looks like there’s a bit of truth to that stereotype about guides making good carers. But none of them are his. None of them make the world slow down, or the barrage of input halt, or any of the other clichés. He meets a few who connect with him well enough to help him out in surgery, but functionality is not the same as compatibility, and he can’t find it in him to be too upset. He just doesn’t need a guide. The zone-outs are infrequent, and they never happen while he’s working. Even years later he’s so in love with Peg it’s appalling; how could there even be room for anyone else?

(He knows it doesn’t have to be that way, knows a sentinel and a guide can have a professional relationship, but he can’t imagine it. Can’t imagine letting someone in like that and then clocking out for the day. Josephine put her hand to his temple and swept his agony away, and she was just a provisional guide, wasn’t even his. BJ Hunnicutt knows himself. He knows when he finds that person, he won’t be able to let go.)

On June 25, 1950, BJ gets the worst news of his life. America is going to war. He’s still got some time left on his residency, but not enough, and there are already whispers of conscription. He knows what comes next. Sentinels are always at the top of the list for selective service, and every war needs its cutters. Three months later, Peg tells him she’s pregnant. (He’d be lying if he said there wasn’t a correlation.)

So they plan. Peg’s been working for a real estate firm for a few years, helping him pay his way through med school; she’s confident that she can start studying for a broker’s license. Elizabeth is thrilled when they tell her she’s going to be a grandmother, and it costs a small fortune to call Floyd in Oklahoma, but it’s worth it for the joy in his voice. BJ’s glad to know that, in the absolute worst case scenario, Peg’s parents will take care of her and the baby. As for his own folks, he thinks – he thinks they’ll help, if it’s needed, but he’s not sure yet how he feels about it, about them being grandparents.

(Peg tells him sometimes that it’s not right, the way his father treated him, and he’s getting better at believing her. But he still can’t always tell, looking back on his childhood, where the line is, and there are nights after they find out Peg’s pregnant that he lies awake, hoping to god he doesn’t do the same to his own kid.)

She’s eight months along when the orders come in. He’s just finished up his residency, conveniently, and then he’s bundled off to Texas with barely enough time to say goodbye. Suddenly BJ’s knee-deep in mud, faux explosions going off around him, and he zones. He zones more in those few weeks than in the last nine years combined, and he’s forgotten how bad it can be, when every fibre of his being is wrapped up in a sound or a sight and nothing else gets through until the violent stinging of those mock bullets rockets through his body.

Three weeks. They said it would take three weeks, but because he’s a sentinel, it takes five. Erin Elizabeth Hunnicutt, his daughter, is born on May 29, 1951, and he’s not there.

He hardly leaves the house over the next few weeks. Every waking moment is spent absorbing it all: the way Erin smells, good and bad, the different cries she makes depending on what she needs, the exact shade of brown her eyes are (just barely a different hue than Peggy’s). He commits to memory the way Erin’s skin feels while he’s cuddling her, and how blissful she and Peg look when she’s fallen asleep in Peg’s arms. Ever since he tuned in, his senses have been used in service of medicine: feeling the slightest variations in a heartbeat, smelling a perforation before he sees it, stitching with unparalleled precision. For just these too-short weeks, he uses those senses to be unrepentantly selfish.

By the time he lands in Kimpo, he’s steeled his resolve. Korea took something irreplaceable from him before he ever set foot on its soil; he’s not going to give it anything more. He’ll be careful, and competent, and someday he’ll get home to his wife and his daughter. Nothing else matters.

Then he shakes the hand of one Hawkeye Pierce, and his whole plan is shot to hell.


	2. Hawkeye

It takes a long time for Hawkeye to see his abilities as anything but a curse.

His parents have him tested when he’s five. He doesn’t remember much, on account of being so small at the time, but his mother tells him he used to cry horrendously whenever they stopped by his father’s practice, even well after he’d grown out of the toddler tantrum phase. So that’s the first thing he knows about being a guide: it hurts.

In the movies and radio programmes he grows up with, it’s supposed to be this grand, romantic thing. It doesn’t feel like it to Hawkeye. It feels like suffocating. When he’s young, he fades into the background of every picture, swept up in the emotions of everyone around him until he can’t tell what his own feelings are. His mother’s death is a wake-up call. He can’t afford to wallow in his father’s grief as well as his own, doesn’t want to be just one more mourner in a black suit. He grows bolder, louder, learns to feel his own emotions so much that they drown out everything else.

The unexpected flip side is that suddenly he _understands_ so much more of what he feels from others. Before, he was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of emotion contained in a single person; now, he can look at them from a distance, pick up the actual substance of it. Heartbreak is different from depression is different from grief, even if they are often all tangled up in one another, and the next time he’s downtown, he goes into his dad’s practice for the first time since he was five.

Seventeen years later, the draft notice comes in the mail. Hawkeye locks himself in his room and cries for a solid hour. It’s fear, plain and simple. Crabapple Cove may be a small town, but they contributed their fair share of boys to the war in Europe. They’re good people, mostly, but Hawkeye doesn’t like the pain he feels in them. Doesn’t want to feel it in himself. But he swore an oath, and he makes himself remember how the McCrearys felt that day in 1944, when the Western Union courier showed up on their doorstep. That was another kind of pain, and if Hawkeye can do anything to prevent it, he has to. He will.

(He doesn’t know it then, but that’s the last time he’s going to cry until Tommy Gillis dies on his operating table.)

There’s plenty of regular army guys hanging around at training, and Hawkeye meets more sentinels than he’d care to. He’s known a few in the past, even worked with some during his residency to help keep them from zoning, but these military guys are different. They treat him like he’s just a guide, like he’s not a surgeon in his own right, and Hawk’s got a nasty feeling this is what it’s gonna be like in Korea.

That feeling follows him all the way to Uijeongbu, and then he meets one Trapper John McIntyre, and thinks maybe some good could come of this clusterfuck after all. It’s familiarity instead of fireworks, a buzz of could-be under Hawkeye’s skin. Not a bond, but a chance at one. It’s dangerous and distracting and Hawk dives in head-first, because he can already tell that this place is gonna tear him apart if he lets it.

And it _works_ , too. Trapper’s good company, and a good surgeon, and maybe he’s a bit more reticent about this thing between them than Hawk is, but he’s not exactly keeping him at arm’s length, either. He’s got three senses tuned in – sight, smell, touch – and he doesn’t zone very often; it’s probably a mercy that sound isn’t one of his enhanced senses, Hawk figures, between the choppers and the shelling.

The first time Trap does zone is about a month in. It’s Hawk’s fault, too – he’s the one who convinced him to fight in that boxing match, in order to keep Cutler at the 4077 th . It’s not even during the fight that Trapper zones – no, he makes it all the way back to the Swamp, lifts a hand up to brush at the bruise blossoming on his cheek, and freezes. It takes Hawk a minute to realise what’s happening, another to finally spur himself into action. He’s done this before. Always start simple, with an unenhanced sense if possible; Hawk begins whispering whatever comes to mind – he’s pretty sure he’s quoting Hamlet at some point – and steps slowly into Trap’s space, cautiously resting his hand on the bare skin of Trapper’s arm. He’s done this before. It’s no different than all the other times.

(It is different. Hawk reaches _out_ with his empathy, feels Trapper respond in that way that only sentinels do, and it’s so different, it’s warm and bright and for the first time Hawkeye feels less like an intruder and more like a guest.)

They’re slow-going, from there, but moving forward. He and Trapper fall more and more in tune with one another, like they’re dancing to a rhythm no one else can hear, making up the steps as they go along. It becomes easier and easier for Hawk to take him out of the occasional zones. In the OR, on the rare occasion that they’re not spread too thin, he and Trap will work on a patient together and it’s like a symphony: they’re flawless, communicating without words, moving so in sync the nurses like to come and watch just for the show. Hawkeye’s never felt anything like it. He’s starting to understand all that hype about bonded pairs of sentinels and guides. He’s so tuned in to Trapper’s emotions, everything else fades into background noise, easy to ignore until he actually _wants_ to pay attention. It’s blissfully quiet.

Then Trapper leaves.

Trapper leaves, and Hawkeye doesn’t get so much as a goodbye note. His presence is just gone – even when he was on R&R, Hawk at least knew that Trap was back at the Swamp, but now there’s nothing. Everyone else’s emotions are clamouring for attention in the back of his mind, but Hawk’s drowning in his own. He isn’t crazy. Not that way, at least. He and Trap, they were working, they were _so close_ to being properly – to being –

Ferret Face doesn’t give him permission to go to Kimpo, but Hawk doesn’t have the tiniest shred of respect for the man anyway, so it works out. He boots Radar out of the driver’s seat and gets them to the airfield in record time. It’s still not fast enough.

Ten lousy minutes.

He’s barely paying attention when he reaches out to shake the hand of Captain BJ Hunnicutt.


End file.
